DISA cloud contract deadline extended again

The Defense Information Systems Agency has again extended its deadline to accept bids for the Enterprise Storage Service II (ESS II) contract, worth up to $427 million.

DISA gave industry an extra week to bid on the cloud-computing contract in October, after publishing the request for proposal on FedBizOpps on Sept. 19 and receiving several questions. It then pushed the bid submission deadline a second time, to Nov. 19 at 10 a.m., after another flurry of questions from prospective vendors.

Thus far, DISA has modified the RFP six times since its release, signifying the importance of a clean procurement. It seeks the "best value" deal, meaning price is only one of several components that factor into which bid to accept. Other factors include risk – rated as low, moderate or high – as well as technical/management and relevant past performance.

The ESS II will replace DISA's $700 million deal with ViON Corp. in 2007. DISA seeks "state of the art" cloud services with scalable, on-demand storage capabilities for the growing gobs of data the Defense Department collects.

According to the RFP, DISA wants all new large-scale storage for structured and unstructured data – classified and unclassified – to be developed by a contractor for the majority of its 18 U.S.-based facilities and six other DISA-approved locations worldwide. Once developed, the government will maintain daily operations of the cloud storage environment and oversight responsibilities.